


Ancient History

by tolstayas



Series: Anna Karenina Isn't Dead [1]
Category: Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Coming Out, F/M, LGBTQ Themes, Loss, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:48:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/pseuds/tolstayas
Summary: In those days Levin used often to be in the Shcherbatskys’ house, and he was in love with the Shcherbatsky household… he not only perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that shrouded them he assumed the existence of the loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection.Can be read as a prequel toLilac, or as a stand-alone story.With thanks to AtlinMerrick, for inspiring me to write about Kostya and his loves!
Relationships: Konstantin "Kostya" Dmitrievich Levin/Princess Ekaterina "Kitty" Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya, Konstantin "Kostya" Dmitrievich Levin/Young Prince Shcherbatsky
Series: Anna Karenina Isn't Dead [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2047421
Comments: 7
Kudos: 5





	Ancient History

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AtlinMerrick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlinMerrick/gifts).



“You knew my brother.”

Konstantin looks up. Kitty is sitting across from him, her legs tucked up under the folds of her dress, her face half-glowing in the firelight. They are both reading; Mitya is asleep. Recently she has been interested in antiquity, borrowing books on history and poetry from his office library. She complains that she’s bored by stories of wars and victors. _What about the ordinary people,_ she asks, reminding Konstantin of his own idealism, the fervour that has cooled in his heart now but threatens to leap up again at every sight of misery, every thought of the voices which have called out, once and never again, into the emptiness. _What about the times of peace? And what about the women?_ He can’t answer, and gives her Aristophanes to read. She doesn’t like it. But she keeps reading, for some reason, as if she’s looking for something, her delicate hands digging for diamonds in the dark earth.

“Yes,” he replies. It’s hardly a question; she knows very well that he and the young Prince Shcherbatsky entered the university together, studied together often at the Shcherbatsky house, were inseparable for years. But he lets the conversation go wherever she wants it to.

Her face is unreadable. Sadness mixed with a hundred other things. “What was he like?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember crying for days, when we got the news. I would sob until I couldn’t breathe. I still have nightmares of drowning, of being trapped under the ice. But I can’t even picture his face. I only remember how sad I was… I only remember myself. Isn’t it horrible?”

Konstantin’s eyes soften. “You were a child. Don’t blame yourself.”

“Will you tell me about him?”

Konstantin puts his book to the side carefully, leans back in his armchair and looks up at the ceiling, at the paint and the candles. Suddenly he feels shame, although he knows he has nothing to hide from Kitty. She’s seen it all already, anyway.

“How much do you want to hear?”

Kitty asks him what he means, although she thinks she knows, briefly remembers that dark, bitter, tearful day, a week before their wedding, when he had given her his diary to read. She had felt betrayed then, powerless, afraid. She had felt that she couldn’t ever understand someone who had done such things. But now she looked back with a light heart on her past fears, on the trivialities which had made her suffer. _You were a child_ , she thought, repeating his words. _Don’t blame yourself_.

“I’m afraid I might shock you,” he says.

“I want to hear everything,” she smiles.

He nods. It’s what he expected. She’s older now, and stronger than she had been; he’s watched it happen. She doesn’t exactly approve of his past excesses, and neither does she quite understand them, but her heart is big enough to hold them now. 

_Pardon me not according to my deserts but according to Thy lovingkindness…_

“We’d been friends since we were children,” he began. “Since before you were born. Your parents’ house always felt like home to me, a lively home, not like my empty one. He was… perfect. Golden hair, bright eyes, the most delicate features I’d ever seen on a boy. When I was with him, I felt like everything was as it should be. Sometimes I cried when I had to leave. I thought I was born into the wrong home. Everything about my life was wrong, everything about his was perfect. I idealised him, wished more than anything to be like him. I envied everything about him, an envy like hellfire, but I never let him see it. I was always gentle with him, for fear he might decide to leave me. I was always trying to prove myself to him, to get him to laugh, to get him to look at me just a little longer. He had the loveliest voice, and a beautiful, bubbling, uncontrollable laugh. Whenever I heard it, I thought of angels.

“As we got older I began to lose control of myself. I’d come to your parents’ house, ostensibly to prepare with him for the university entrance exams, but once I got there I would talk him out of studying so we could lounge around and make fun of our tutors. Then I’d help him cheat on tests, so nobody would catch on to what we were doing. I was a real devil of a friend. More than once I stole bottles from your parents’ cellar and we drank until we lost our minds completely. We’d sneak out of the house and stagger around the streets. It was when we were drunk that I was at my worst. I’d make up excuses to touch him, sling my arm around his shoulder as we walked, let my fingers trail across his chest, press my face to his. I would have obscene dreams and wake up with a pounding headache, and I wouldn’t be able to meet his eye all day. But a few weeks later we’d be at it again. 

“By the time we entered the university I _knew_ I wanted him.” 

Konstantin stops talking for a moment, astonished at his own frankness, caught between shame and wonder, at the same time fraught with anxiety and revelling in the freedom of confession. He looks into Kitty’s eyes, wondering if he’s gone too far, and she looks back at him with impossible kindness. He feels a sudden surge of affection for her, overpowering, emboldening. _My wife._ He knows he has nothing to fear, and starts to speak again.

“I was so disillusioned that it didn’t even occur to me to be ashamed,” he admits, with a strange sense of nostalgia. “If anything, it was exciting. I wanted to rebel, to do things the wrong way around, to break every rule and defy every authority. I wanted to be provocative and shocking and revolting. And this, I thought, this was just part of it. He was far less rebellious… But he could never say no to me. I became interested in the emancipation of the serfs, and I dragged him into it with me, taking him along to illegal meetings and secret assemblies. He never refused, never even complained. 

“For a long time I thought he was just being polite, and felt guilty for corrupting him. I stopped touching him, fearing that I was taking advantage of his generosity, taking and taking until one day there would be nothing left. But after a while I understood that there was something else at work. When I began to drink only in moderation, afraid of what I might do if I truly lost my restraint, he swung in the other direction, making good use of the wine I left untouched. Drunk, he would come to sit on my lap, or kiss my hands over and over again, or lie at my feet and rest his head on my knee, letting me stroke his hair. I would sit perfectly still, as if frozen in place, face flushed, my heart pounding against my ribs. 

“I couldn’t make any sense of it at first. And then I realised it was his way of talking to me. He couldn’t _say_ he wanted me back, the same way he couldn’t fly or walk on water. He couldn’t even _think_ it. It wasn’t that he was ashamed, it was just inconceivable to him - completely inconceivable. It used to frustrate me that he would speak of love only in the abstract, and desire not at all - at that time all I ever talked about was love and politics - because I thought he was being puritanical, absurdly euphemistic, falsely pure. But then I realised he didn’t know how. How to talk about it, how to think about it. For a while I tried to get him to read novels, real passionate romances, thinking if I taught him the language I could change him; but he wasn’t having it. He could talk about love, and he could feel desire, but he would never, ever make the link between the two.

“Once I understood that, I lost all my scruples. It all went so quickly. One night I was agonising over my unrequited passion, and the next I was walking with him to my room with one clear intention glowing like the sun in my mind, annihilating all my other thoughts: tonight I would kiss him. And I did. I didn’t wait until he was drunk; I was absolutely sure I had understood what was going on. I was right, too; he didn’t object, not once, and I still remember the way he smiled at me the first time I kissed him on the lips. A laughing, almost teasing kind of a smile, like he’d known all along. After that he let me kiss him wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted. I knew he would never acknowledge what we were doing, but I didn’t care. I was the happiest man in the world. Until, of course, he had to go off to the navy, and I felt like I’d lost the only thing that made sense in my life. He was… He was…”

“He was your first love,” Kitty says softly.

Konstantin nods.

“I had no idea,” Kitty murmurs, then rolls her eyes at herself. “Of course I didn’t. Is that why you always wanted to marry one of us?” Seeing the surprised look on Konstantin’s face, she laughs. “Natalia told me you called on her once or twice, before she was engaged to Lvov. And when Dolly had problems with her marriage, _maman_ used to cry and tell me she should have married her to you instead.” 

Konstantin blushes. “I suppose that was part of it. I wanted to marry _him_ , and I couldn’t, so I turned to his sisters… but, God, how happy am I that I did!” He smiles, then looks at his hands. “It really doesn’t bother you? You knew already that you weren’t my first love, but…”

At that, Kitty laughs, a real, heartfelt laugh that bounces around the spacious sitting-room. “I’m not a child anymore,” she says, and then: “Besides, I’ve never told you who _my_ first love was.”

Konstantin raises an eyebrow. “Not Vronsky?”

“God forbid.” Kitty shakes her head. “No, I fancied his mistress first.”

“Anna?”

She nods. “She fascinated me. She was so mysterious, she would say such captivating things - as if she were always hinting at something more, but never quite saying it straight out. And she had this way of swinging between eagerness and tranquility. There was something complex and poetic about her, somehow. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, until she danced with Vronsky, and I was so heartbroken at losing them both at once that I almost died.” She shakes her head. “I was so silly.”

Konstantin is silent for a long moment, his eyes shining. “I thank God,” he says finally and with unexpected solemnity, “That I was lucky enough to marry you.”

Kitty puts aside the book she’d been holding in her lap, and steps across the room to sit beside him, resting her head on his shoulder. He puts an arm around her. For a few minutes they sit in silence, listening to each other’s breathing, to the clock ticking, to the sounds of the house. 

“Where were you when he died?” Kitty finally asks.

“In the country,” he says, his voice suddenly thick with emotion. “I took the first train to Moscow when I got the news, without knowing where I was going or why, without thinking to bring anything with me. I arrived at your parents’ house empty-handed, in only my walking clothes, with barely enough money to pay the driver, and broke down in tears as soon as the door opened.”

“I don’t remember you being there.”

“Your mother didn’t want me to stay. I don’t know if she had any idea of what he and I had been for each other, and telling her certainly wouldn’t have helped. So I left, went to the Oblonskys’. Dolly was with the family, but Stiva had stayed back - he hadn’t known your brother well, and he and Dolly had been fighting over something, the children’s education or the house or the staff, so he thought it better to let her go alone. He sat with me for hours while I cried and raged. I kept saying how it was all your parents’ fault, which was horrible of me, but it was the only way I could think of to live with it. If they hadn’t persuaded him to join the navy, I kept thinking, I would still be living in my idyll with him, locked away from reality. Stiva didn’t try to calm me down, only listened to my rages and every once in a while poured me a glass of something. Eventually I exhausted myself, and came to my senses enough to see that it was no use to throw around the blame, that death is always senseless and never deserved. I stayed with Stiva until the funeral. If he understood what I had felt for your brother, he never let on. But he’s a strange one. You can never figure out what he knows and what he doesn’t.”

Kitty reaches out, takes Konstantin’s hand in her own.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes. “I can’t imagine the pain.”

“I thought I would never love again,” admits Konstantin. “And in truth I’ve never had for anyone else the same feelings I had for him. I love you, but differently. I suppose that’s the secret.”

“I don’t know if it’s a secret,” muses Kitty, “but I am thankful to you, for telling me.”

Konstantin holds her close.

“Do you still love her?” he asks after a while.

Kitty takes a slow breath. She doesn't have to ask who he means. “Would you understand if I said yes?”

“Of course,” he says. “You love her, but differently.”

Kitty nods.

“I’m thankful you told me, too.”

In each other’s arms by the fire, they sit in silence, listening to each other’s breathing, to the clock ticking, to the sounds of the house.


End file.
